Bits and pieces from the thoughts of novelist, James Paddock

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Archive of posts filed under the Writing category.

I’ve heard the following question often in the last twenty years as a novelist: “Where do you get your ideas for your stories?” I think every storyteller comes up with the same answer, although maybe in many different ways; from the world around us. I found Remembering Death in my community. Life around us is our …

Is it a dark and stormy night or what? There are a number of links to online resources for writers that I keep on my desktop while I’m writing. They include several different kinds of dictionaries, of course, as well as Sun & Moon data, the Almanac, a name generator, and more. I’d love to …

What methods do you employ in your novels to keep to keep your characters and timelines, as well as scenes and events, straight? How do you make sure when you give a character green eyes in chapter 3 that you didn’t give her blue eyes in chapter 30, or that you don’t have your villain …

Dusty Books is not about dusty books… or at times it can be if we are talking about a book that has been on the shelf gathering dust for some time. You could say it is about books we have read which now gather dust, or it is about some of us with more years …

Most of you probably never realized that Dusty Books, the Desert Bookshelf Blog, was gone. I attempted to update my web host as well as blog host and wound up destroying the entire blog. I may be able to recreate most of the posts, or the ones that were worthwhile anyway, so for the next …